Over the past few years social networking has become an important tool for a user to stay connected with peers. A social networking site hosting and sharing data can be for general purposes, connecting people with different interests and covering a wide range of locations. There can also be social networking sites that connect people with specific interests. For example, a social networking site can connect people with keen interest on photography, connect job seekers and recruiters, or connect employees within a large enterprise, and so on.
These social networking sites typically run through a user's web browser. Recently, there have been also stand-alone applications for some of the popular social networking sites. These applications can keep the user logged into the online community and generate pop-up messages for the user when the user closes a browser session or directs the browser to a different website.
Often, a user may want to move from a browser session to a stand-alone application and continue to participate in the same online community. Migrating from a browser session to a stand-alone application typically requires the same contextual information (e.g., the uniform resource locator (URL) of the online community and user information) to be present in the stand-alone application. A common challenge involved in this challenge is how to communicate this contextual information from the browser to the stand-alone application without requiring the user to enter the information manually (such as typing or pasting the URL into the stand-alone application). For example, consider an online forum for the employees of an enterprise. When a user authenticated to use the forum via a web browser wishes to continue to access the forum in a stand-alone application and not have to leave a browser tab open; the user often must re-enter the forum's URL they wish to join into the stand-alone application, before providing his security credentials.